What's the best way to read/write array contents from/to binary files in C#?

Posted by Eric on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Eric
Published on 2010-04-08T14:31:49Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 14:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 362

Filed under:

c#

|

binaryfiles

|

input-output

I would like to read and write the contents of large (> 2GB), raw volume files (e.g. MRI scans). These files are just a sequence of e.g. 32 x 32 x 32 floats so they map well to 1D arrays. I would like to be able to read the contents of the binary volume files into 1D arrays of e.g. float or ushort (depending on the data type of the binary files) and similarly export the arrays back out to the raw volume files.

What's the best way to do this with C#? Read/Write them 1 element at a time with BinaryReader/BinaryWriter? Read them piece-wise into byte arrays with FileStream.Read and then do a System.Buffer.BlockCopy between arrays (keeping in mind that I want > 2GB arrays)? Write my own Reader/Writer?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about binaryfiles

Git checking out problem [fatal: early EOFs]

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Dear all, I'm running a Ubuntu (9.10) server with Git (latest from Ubuntu package manager) installed. Access to the Git is via SSH. On windows machines, I'm using Cygwin to push/pull code. I can push my project code onto the server but when I do a clone or pull, it returns a [fatal: early EOFs]… >>> More
Changing one byte of a file in Perl

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Very similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/845127/changing-one-byte-in-a-file-in-c, but in Perl instead of C: How can I open a binary file in Perl, change ONLY the first byte, and write it back out? >>> More
Reading Binary file in C

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi All, I am having following issue with reading binary file in C. I have read the first 8 bytes of a binary file. Now I need to start reading from the 9th byte. Following is the code: fseek(inputFile, 2*sizeof(int), SEEK_SET); However, when I print the contents of the array where I store the… >>> More
Using boost::iostreams to parse a binary file byte by byte

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
So I would like to parse a binary file and extract some data from it. The problem I am facing with this is that I need to convert a stream of chars to a stream of unsigned chars. Reading the boost documentation, it seems that boost::iostreams::code_converter should be the solution for this, so I tried… >>> More
Download binary file From SQL Server 2000

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I inserted binary files (images, PDF, videos..) and I want to retrieve this file to download it. I used generic handler page as this public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context) { using (System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection con = Connection.GetConnection()) { String Sql = "Select… >>> More